Re: how to grep on three items

> but is there a nicer way ?

Almost always. "man grep":

[...] By default, the grep command treats a pattern as a basic regular expression (BRE). With the -E option, the pattern is treated as an extended regular expression (ERE). With the -F option, the pattern is considered a fixed string. See the following discussion of regular expressions.[...]

Re: how to grep on three items

Thanks all for the thinking.

In the meantime i've accepted the solution grep 'a.*b.*d' as for me the best option, but submitting points does not work for me at this moment due to firewall rules or something so this weekend i will do my job to thank you all the propper way!